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Grave injustice: Someone else buried in woman's plot

CALGARY -- Joyce Woolley's great-grandfather would be turning in his grave if he only knew -- and he'd find a total stranger interred in the plot next door.

It's a real-estate snafu involving a few square metres of Medicine Hat, Alta., soil, and who has the right to be lying under six feet of it -- Woolley, or the person currently buried there.

"It's not the fault of the people there now, it's the fault of the city," Woolley told QMI Agency. "This is a case of extremely poor record keeping."

According to family history and two old letters, dated 1938 and 1958, it's 75-year-old Woolley who should be eventually resting at peace with her family in the city-run Hillside Cemetery.

With three generations of her family already buried in plots purchased by her great-grandfather Theodore Marks over a century ago, Woolley always assumed her place beside her parents and ancestors was safe.

But just to make sure, the Tottenham, Ont., resident paid a visit to the graveyard in July while on a trip out west to see family.

Instead of the two empty plots provided to her through inheritance and described in copies of letters sent to the Medicine Hat city treasurer, she found a stranger's gravestone.

"You can imagine my shock, dismay, distress and finally, anger discovering that there is already someone else buried in my place," Woolley wrote in a letter to 'Hat Mayor Norm Boucher.

Officials with the City of Medicine Hat are well aware of the complaint over Block 126D of the venerable 80-acre cemetery, which holds more than 28,000 graves dating back 125 years.

They've been scouring the record books ever since Woolley filed an official complaint back in July, but all the graveyard ledger shows is the same "Woolley" crossed out and the current owner written in.

Randy Taves, parks operations manager and the boss of the city's graveyards, says the record book doesn't explain why the two plots were sold to new owners prior to 1997, just that they were.

"We're not trying to be difficult, but from our perspective, she does not own them, and the plots were sold prior to 1997," Taves said.

"That leaves us in a bit of a pickle."

Taves says it's not unusual for owners of plots to sell back to the city or to other people, like any other real estate. He suggests that may be the case here.

"Since the last letter from 1958, that's 40 years, and it may have been sold back to the city in that time," Taves said.

But Woolley says no way, and though she doesn't expect the person now using the plot to vacate, she says the city should reimburse her for the land and the trouble she's going through.

"I don't want them to have to move -- they bought the plots in good faith, because they assumed they were available," Woolley said.

The senior is plenty annoyed, especially after discovering this isn't the first case of gravesite controversy involving Hillside bookkeeping.

Newspapers dug up by Woolley and her family show that in 2002, the City of Medicine Hat actually asked the wife of a recently-interred man to move his body, after realizing the plot was already owned.

The wife refused, and the matter was eventually settled when the city provided another Hillside plot to the real owners.

But in the course of that cemetery scandal, it was reported that same plot had been accidentally sold in 1994 too, and that family had been forced to shift the remains when the real owner complained.

Both those cases were blamed on sketchy record-keeping over a century of operation, and Taves admits errors are occasionally made.

As a goodwill gesture, they've offered to inter Woolley's ashes with her parents -- she says she plans to be cremated when the time comes -- or to place her remains in a plot six metres away, free of charge.

"We do not resell plots, not intentionally," Taves said.

"But over 100 years, occasionally mistakes are made. There's no proof the plots are hers, but this is a goodwill gesture."